Joaquín Ortega

JOAQUÍN ORTEGA was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1969. He has published plays, such as Lo escuché llorar en mi Boca: Tríptico de Caracas (I’ve Heard Him Crying in My Mouth: Caracas Triptych), and poetry, including De Cara al Río (Facing the River). He has taught the courses "Visual Thinking," "Screenwriting," and "Comedy Writing for Radio and TV" as well as "Writing Science Fiction Films." He is currently teaching political theory, focused in Political Dystopias and Cinema at the Escuela de Estudios Políticos y Administrativos, Universidad Central de Venezuela (the School of Political and Administration Studies at Venezuelan Central University).

Photo by EFRÉN HERNÁNDEZ ARIAS

Joaquín Ortega

MADMAN OF GOD

MADNESS IS A BITE; it’s a laugh and a groan. It is too many times a feigned excuse and is rooted in multiple grounds. It dresses in clothing from different eras—and the tones are diverse. Beside misery, it could blend in to become just another detail of any anonymous city. You see it often in the streets that I frequent; it seems to be part of a darker plan, darker than night, which ends in silencing it.

I like to talk with the madmen of Caracas. Sometimes the conversations turn out to be good. There are just a few topics that recur: the taste of sweet, spontaneous rain; the possibility of earthquakes; and the growing dangers of the streets—but you squeeze the essence, take what you can from them. On other occasions, the men push me away with grunts, or they take advantage and steal something more than what I’ve brought them: a soft drink or daily newspapers. More than one recording device and one or another cap have ended up in their hands without my permission.

Any of these people who are ill will ask for money and food. They sleep in hallways protected from rain; they have faint looks, crystal clear or evidently disturbed. If their stories were to merge, it’s no wonder that what would arise is a good deck of literary cards: the ingredients of failure, anguish, human losses, medical abuse, and family distance, all moving nimbly among arguments. With the effect of good and continuous treatment, friendship may get stronger, or end as soon as it begins, and that perhaps may be the other side of madness: the fragility of permanence, the elusiveness of one’s ways.

One day, talking to Gustavo, a homeless man with schizophrenic episodes, I learned that he was once a firefighter and plane copilot—all of this according to his version of events, of course. Gustavo introduced me to others like him, who were harmless. He taught me to distinguish between safe and unsafe places to sleep, and he even gave me instructions for taking pictures so that my camera wouldn’t be in danger of being stolen: “You carry the camera in your pocket, and when you see something good, you take it out and shoot … and you put it back again, very fast ... like a cowboy from a movie.”

Returning from a baseball game on a rainy afternoon, I saw Gustavo with the skin of his hands broken; his eyes, normally calm, seemed less friendly and more anxious than usual. His wet, backswept hair gave him an air of fragile sobriety. He looked like a statue that matched the color of the street. When I saw him move, I knew he was affected by something. “It was a small car, a blue one, with blurred license plates; it hit him and ran away.” I did not know where that voice came from, since because of disbelief and confusion I was upset. Gustavo did not cry; he remained sitting motionless beside the strange crossroads where he had been run over.

With the help of a university ambulance that passed, almost by miracle, we got him on board, putting him carefully on a stretcher from a nearby hospital. They took his clothes, treated his injuries, and sedated him without screams or resistance. His husky and sweet voice wasn’t present. Once he was asleep, they shaved his hair and a part of his beard and cut the nails on hands and toes.

The doctor spoke of fractures, bruises, cuts on the head, burns, scrapes from asphalt between ears and face. Two weeks passed, and a few people from the hospital understood that Gustavo cooperated with or without smiling. He was not an annoying person; he didn’t grumble; he didn’t bother anyone. And when he could get up by himself, he went to the bathroom to avoid asking for professional assistance.

I visited him at least twice a week until he was released from the hospital. In such cases, it is customary, one of the doctors told me, to have the patient recover physically, stabilize him, heal his wounds—possibly to refer him into a psychiatric department if he were to show any type of violence: episodic or non-episodic. Gustavo behaved well. He smiled, and he ate when nurses or relatives of other patients offered him something. He just drank lots of water with a little embarrassment; lying on his back, he asked: “Go to the bathroom.” In that situation, “go to the bathroom” meant that a nurse should take pity on his predicament; she placed under his buttocks a metal device that was very cold; then he sat and surrendered to release his bladder.

People from the zone visited him: a Haitian fruits salesman brought him tangerines; a caustic priest, much too old, blessed him with a voice bordering on the cante jondo; a college professor—whose first job was as a social worker helping young people in the street—gave him injectable vitamins and took his fingerprints awkwardly and unhurriedly. Gustavo was always polite at all times, an inscrutable observer of his visitors. Inside these walls drenched in alcohol, morphine, patches, and sutures, he also made riends and generated sympathy. With his half-shaved beard and hair almost completely shaven off, he seemed to be a yogi, a student of some Asian religion, a lost veteran of a war he never caused ... or just a castaway, saturated by outside seas.

Upon leaving, his face did not change. His new clothes shattered over time. The hair returned to its natural savagery, his beard grew uneven, and his walk was a little bandy-legged. He was called by several nearby restaurants to take out some packages by the back door. The regular sleeping place for him—one between a couple of buildings about to fall down—gave way to a small, but functional, hotel catering to tourism and overnight sexual encounters. Gustavo spoiled the site, and the owners gave sufficient “monetary” reasons to the police so that no crazy person would be walking around the premises, at least in daylight hours.

In less than five years, the man seemed to keep the pulse of life without changes. Gustavo walked long distances, and one day I was lucky to run into him in the northeast of the city. He looked clean again, with clothes that were anything but rags. There was a foundation that supported men from the streets, mentally ill patients, and those who have the night as their bedroom. I was glad to see him, and he recognized me across the street, raising his hand as a greeting sign. His walk was slow and a little bit crooked, but he looked a little fatter and less elusive. In a line with other men, most of them tall and slightly trembling, they were opening a box where there were shoes, used toys, second-hand books, percussion instruments, and empty frames. Surrounding that finite universe of arbitrary gifts, as I envisioned it, were magicians pulling rabbits out of a mysterious, talking hat. I left with a half-smile and an overwhelming desire to know more, especially about myself.

Gustavo disappeared from the places where I usually found him, but he left me with certain techniques, which I still use to strengthen bonds of trust with other street friends. One day, I took a photo of a homeless man who spoke very little. The image was something magical, and the following year, I signed up to be part of a few international amateur competitions. The photo had no luck in the contests, but those who saw it were captivated by the image. Something caught their attention, which was the same thing that had somehow led me from the beginning: it was a grace from another world, a battered and unattended majesty, nonetheless sublime. The madman of God was born.

Every Tuesday I go back to the place where I took the picture, trying to find the model from that day, but I cannot find him. With some friends, I organized a walk where this character was always seen. We asked his fellow street men, but he is still nowhere to be found. I go on, without losing hope of finding him; of course, I try not to insist too much on a search that could lead me to other domains. Every alley should be approached with care, and perhaps too many attempts would just end up bringing me something like a bite, a laugh, or a groan.